Fire and Brimstone
by Sionnain
Summary: St. John tries to come to terms with being Pyro, and what it means to be a bad guy. Set after X2. MagnetoPyro.


**Fire and Brimstone **

_The devil stands ready to fall upon them, and seize them as his own…they belong to him; he has their souls in his possession, and under his dominion. _--Jonathan Edwards, _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. _

St. John Allerdyce thought running off to join the bad guys meant he never had to follow rules again, but that apparently wasn't the case. 

'Cause he had to follow rules, all right. They were weird, and definitely a lot more involved than "Don't leave the lights on when you leave a room", but they were still rules. And rules made him restless and want to do everything in his power to break them, but maybe that wasn't such a great idea.

It was more like, "Don't use anyone's first name, ever," and "If someone comes at you with intent to harm, be it human or mutant, kill them." Pyro figured those weren't rules that you should break, because it wasn't like he'd just get detention with Mr. Summers.

Pyro didn't have a problem going by "Pyro," because that was the name he chose when he first figured out what his Mutant powers were. It wasn't all that original, but it wasn't like "Magneto" was, either, so really, he was in good company.

Besides, he didn't even _know _Mystique's first name, so…

The second rule would have been more interesting if he ever got to _go _anywhere. The Brotherhood's headquarters was on an island—with not a lot of opportunities to venture off of it. Hell, Pyro might have considered returning to the Forces of Good if they lured him back with the promise of video games.

Pyro had a feeling, though, that they'd washed their hands of him at Xavier's long before he'd actually left with Magneto and Mystique. Sometimes he'd catch the edge of a glance from the Professor, and there would be a sad, tired look in the other man's eyes that would remind him of social workers that came to talk to his mom sometimes, and that made him mad.

Plus, it had always creeped him out, knowing the Professor was a telepath. Did he know what Pyro thought, then, every night when he couldn't sleep, when he was in the shower, when he…? 

Didn't matter, not now. Mystique was less-than-friendly on a good day, and Magneto might be a bit of a megalomaniac, but at least Pyro's thoughts were his own.

There were days when that was a poor substitute for video games, though. Sometimes he thought he'd give a million dollars to have Bobby Drake there for a game of Tekken.

"Do you read, Pyro?"

Pyro looked up from the fireball he was bouncing in his palm, wondering if he was going to get in trouble for playing with fire indoors. He was in the library, sprawled with typical adolescent disdain across the sofa like a lanky puppy, with just about as much pent-up energy coursing through him. It manifested itself in the fireball resting in his palm; the flame fluid and mercurial as it shifted through a variety of shapes.

He'd go outside gladly, if there was any way to do that and enjoy it. What kind of an island didn't have a goddamned beach?

_The kind you live on when you don't want anyone to show up or leave without you knowing about it. Like in Prince of Persia where you had to claw your way to the Emperor of Time's castle on the island without a beach. Took me two days and a cheat code, and I still had to have Dr. McCoy help me. _

"Sometimes," he said in answer to Magneto's question, and there was a touch of petulance in his voice that was probably inherent when someone in authority asked him a question. "I like comic books."

Magneto made a sound that might have been a sigh or a laugh; Pyro couldn't decide which it was. It was the sort of look he was used to from adults—as if they didn't know whether or not he was amusing or just tiresome.

"And what kind of comic books do you like?" Magneto continued. Pyro narrowed his eyes because that was _definitely _amusement in his voice now.

His fingers stilled on the lighter, the metal warm in his palm from the quick bursts of flame combined with the heat from his body. He was always too warm—apparently it was some side-effect of his mutation—which wasn't too much of a problem in the fortress, which was always freezing.

He looked up at Magneto, who was sitting at his shiny chrome desk directly across the room, and staring at him with an intense amount of concentration that made Pyro nervous. He usually thought that the older man looked at him with eyes that slid right past him, as if he were something inconsequential, a piece of furniture in a room that rated a glance only because it was new. 

"I—I like Hellboy." Pyro knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn't help it. Having Magneto's full attention on him made him nervous, and Pyro didn't like to be nervous. He hated to feel out of place, as if everyone else belonged but _him… _

"Stop that," Magneto said calmly, and it took Pyro a few minutes to realize he had gone back to flicking the lighter again.

"Sorry," Pyro mumbled, sounding as far from sorry as he possibly could. 

Magneto only laughed again, but this time, there was a hint of something darker and a touch more unpleasant in the sound. "You're having a few doubts about what you've done, aren't you?"

It wasn't a question, so Pyro didn't treat it like one. Meaning, he didn't answer.

"Well, we all have doubts, Pyro. Just don't do anything stupid." Magneto, apparently losing interest in the conversation, returned to his book.

"Like what?"

Pyro had never been gifted with knowing when to keep his mouth shut, teenage-boy tendencies aside.

"Oh, I don't know, attempt to swim back to the Institute?" Adding insult to his contemptuous tone was the casual turning of the page in the book he was reading; as if suggesting that Pyro was so unimportant that he could read a book and carry on a conversation simultaneously.

Pyro wasn't so fond of being insulted. Before he could reason out why this might not be the best idea he'd ever had, he flipped open his lighter again, and— 

It went _wooshing _across the room and ended up captured in Magneto's raised hand. His eyes were still on his book. "Or trying that," he said casually, then raised his head to meet Pyro's gaze.

Oh, _shit _. That was the sort of, "This is how I look before I twist you around into a pretzel and toss you to the sharks" look.

"If you think you need to throw a fireball at me, I'd appreciate an attempt at a discussion first. I don't think I need to remind you that this entire fortress is constructed out of metal?" His voice became patronizing. "You do remember why they call me Magneto, do you not?"

"You collect magnets?"

Maybe Bobby Drake was right. Maybe he _did _have a death wish.

For a heartbeat of a second, Pyro was convinced Magneto was going to use his powers to levitate his heavy chrome desk and then drop it directly over Pyro's head. As oblivious as Pyro was sometimes, even _he _could feel the tension rising in the room between them, and it made him nervous.

"Would you like to return to Xavier's?"

There was not a hint of emotion in Magneto's voice, but Pyro found he couldn't look at him anyway. "No." He'd never understood how scary emotionless was until just now.

"Then I suggest you attempt to act like less of an ungrateful brat, else you'll find yourself begging the good Professor for his pardon since you could not handle life with the bad guys." Magneto turned his attention back to his book and levitated the lighter back to Pyro.

Of all times in his life Pyro had been threatened—and there'd been many—he'd never once believed it with ever single fiber of his being as he did right then. Slowly he pocketed the lighter, then unfolded his body from the couch and crept towards the door. Magneto gave no evidence that he was aware he was leaving.

Pyro heard that tell-tale sound of metal being manipulated, a low-pitched hollow clanging noise, but he was a second too slow to figure out what that meant. The door to the library swung close in a sudden burst of movement, and he felt a breeze of air on his face as it shut firmly, barring his exit.

Damn metal doors. Pyro gritted his teeth as he heard Magneto laugh. "Just a minute, Pyro, if you don't mind."

_I mind _. He refused to turn around. _Refused _.

"I am aware this place might not hold many delights for a young man such as yourself," Magneto said from across the room, in a voice that chilled Pyro's blood. "Do try not to be bored."

"No, it's—it's fine." He just wanted to leave, go to his room, and his voice was all forced politeness, the kind that tricked social workers and nosy roommates into thinking he was being agreeable.

"Is it?" 

Magneto was right behind him; Pyro hadn't heard him move. He was suddenly conscious of the other man's body heat, in a way only someone who could control flames could possibly be. Sensing all that heat made him more conscious of the chill of the rest of the room pressing around him, and he shivered.

"Yeah," Pyro tossed back, all young insolence and false bravado. Besides his lighter, clutched in his hand, they were the only things he had that were his own.

Magneto's fingers were suddenly on his neck, draped over his nape, as if he was going to grab him by the scruff of the neck. He was reminded of his mom's boyfriends trying to make him obey, but this was different, and while he wanted to struggle he found that he couldn't move. "You're like a racehorse that needs to be broken," Magneto breathed, breath ghosting hotly over his skin. "Is that what you wish of me? Is that what you seek to gain with all of your obstinate behavior?"

Why the hell—Pyro swallowed, unsure what, if anything, he should say to that. He felt strangely dizzy, almost light-headed, from the pressure of the other man's fingers on his skin, light yet insistent. "Um…"

Magneto laughed and it stirred the tiny hairs on Pyro's neck. "I'm not your enemy, my friend. Keep all that anger for someone who really deserves it." 

"Yeah? Who?" Pyro's voice was low, pulsing with something very close to rage, as if the fire he controlled was boiling beneath his veins and threatening to erupt. His hand itched to go for his lighter, wanting to feel the slick comfort of it in his palm.

"I'll leave the specifics up to you, but don't waste all that talent on someone who is not worthy. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." Something about the way he said the last reminded Pyro of the Professor when he quoted things out of books, the language strangely formal. "So choose carefully, my new recruit. You understand me?"

It was very hard to breathe, but Pyro managed to nod. Magneto was not Professor Xavier, and it was best that he not forget that. "Yes, sir," he said quietly, gifting Magneto with the honorific that had never, ever graced his lips before. One of his mom's boyfriends had tried to get him to call him that, once. He'd melted the tires on the loser's car.

Magneto's hand landed on his shoulder and patted once, gently. "Good. Now off with you. And I don't have comics. However, you might read this. It's called a book."

Pyro gritted his teeth at that but reached out and grabbed the book Magneto held out to him. He looked at the title with a faint scowl of confusion. _The Picture of Dorian Gray. _

He took the book mainly because he feared didn't want to push his luck any further than he figured he'd already pushed it. Magneto patted him again on the shoulder, voice considerably warmer as he said, "Good boy."

That tone should have pissed him off, but strangely, it didn't. It warmed something inside of him, some vacant place the fire had not yet managed to reach no matter how hard he tried to will it to do so. The door opened and he left the room with a brief glance backwards. Magneto was ignoring him, and Pyro hesitated a moment before leaving.

His neck still burned from where Magneto had touched him.

He passed Mystique on the stairs that led up to the bedrooms, and she smirked at him. He didn't smirk back, because he was beginning to think maybe that was the closest thing to a smile Mystique had.

That night when he woke up at night, it was cold and dark in his room and he huddled under the blankets, arms wrapped around himself and teeth chattering. The light that came in from the moon made his room look foreign and weird, and it wasn't like that nice comfortable arrangement of furniture at the Institute.

For one thing, there was a rather large drop into sharp pointy rocks and furious surf right beyond the windows. For a moment he thought he felt the room shift, and clutched the bedcovers in his hands as he fought the irrational panic that he was going to tumble out of bed, skid across the cold tile floor, and plunge head-long out the window. 

He was in the freezing, cavernous room that passed for his bedroom, and the roar of the sea outside was never a comfort like it was at Xavier's, when he and Bobby would sleep with their window open in the fall. Then the sea in Westchester was gentle and soothing, almost quiet, like a lullaby.

In the waves here at Magneto's, he heard mocking laughter and a voice saying _it's a long way to fall, St. John. _

He didn't feel so very much like Pyro just now.

He was just St. John, and he forgot about mutant rights and self-preservation and autonomy and all he could remember was that he'd run away from the only home he'd ever had, and now he lived in a fortress on an island with terrorists. Nothing about it was cool or exciting, and what had he done, and had he actually killed any of those cops in Boston…?

Usually when he got like this, when ice replaced the comforting burn in his blood, he'd find the lighter and make himself feel better by playing with the fire, but tonight it didn't work. The fire was external, and he needed it be inside of him and it wouldn't cooperate. What was he left with if he didn't even have that? What use was he?

_A long way to fall, St. John… ___

_That's why I hate my stupid name. Ain't a saint, ain't gonna ever be, and why can't I just go back to being Pyro again? _

Finally he got out of bed and went downstairs in his plain black pajama bottoms (he'd bought all black clothes when they'd stopped on their way back to the island from Alkali, because he was a bad guy now. Except that it sort of made him look like a caricature of an evil henchman, which wasn't exactly what he was going for), clutching the book Magneto had given him. He'd started it before bed and fallen asleep trying to read the damned thing.

Maybe that'd work again.

There wasn't a light on in the library, so he went in and settled on the couch with a blanket around his shoulders, and switched on the small light next to him. He didn't get why Magneto wanted him to read this stupid book, though. It wasn't all that interesting, but at least it was something to keep his mind off other things.

"You're up late, St. John."

He wasn't normally skittish, but he'd thought himself alone in the library and he jumped with a rather un-villain-like squeak, his heart pounding. He could barely make out Magneto's figure in the chair behind his desk, all he saw was the arrangement of limbs in the chair, straight as a steel beam. 

"Didn't know you were in here." Pyro said, sounding a little breathless from fright. Well, he'd been reading for close to an hour, could he not have said something earlier?

"Obviously. It is very rude to enter a room without seeing if someone is in it and might not wish for your company." Magneto sounded vaguely amused but also slightly irritated, as if Pyro had interrupted him in the midst of some grand scheme to destroy humanity.

Come to think of it, maybe he had.

"There wasn't a light on," he said, huddling deeper into the blanket, wishing he could just disappear. If he had a dollar for every time he'd had that particular wish, he could build his own mutant hideout fortress. And there'd be a goddamned Playstation in every room.

"No," Magneto said, but there a curiously soft note in his voice. "No there wasn't. I forget you've just joined us, St. John. Forgive me."

At the use of his first name coupled with an obvious apology, he looked up in surprise. "How'd you know I was—" he shook his head, unsure how to put into words what he was thinking. _How'd you know I felt more like St. John than Pyro? _

"Some nights I feel more like Erik," he said quietly. "It doesn't mean anything. It happens."

"You feel guilty or something?" Ostensibly he meant for the near-extinction humanity had almost suffered at Magneto's hands, but Pyro was sure there were other things that might keep Magneto up at night.

"No." The amber light which was diffused throughout the room made Magneto look almost sinister as it reached him there, sitting at his desk, casting him as a terrifying shadow with dark pools for eyes. "Do you?"

_What the hell am I doing here, anyway…? _

"And what if I do?" Pyro felt horrible, suddenly, as if he were admitting he wasn't good enough to be a bad guy. Or bad enough.  
Whatever.

"Do you have a picture somewhere?" His voice was becoming a bit frantic.

"I beg your pardon?" Magneto sounded a tad bewildered, as if Pyro had finally managed to confuse or discern him. Oddly, that made Pyro feel better and he spoke with more confidence. 

"You know, a picture. Like this guy had," he said, picking up the book. "So that every time you do something bad, you can see it on the picture's face, you know, all the evil?" He waved the book around almost comically.

"Yes, it's called the mirror," Magneto snapped, and then he stood up. He walked over to the couch and stared down at Pyro, arms crossed over his chest.

"No magic portrait here, I'm afraid. Believe me, St. John, everything you do in the name of our cause will show somewhere. On your soul, on your face, in your eyes." He was looking at him intently, and St. John almost wished he'd have stayed over there in his chair, because there was some macabre knowledge gleaming in Magneto's grey-blue gaze that Pyro sensed he would not understand, not for a long time, not unless there were many more days like Boston in his future.

Which, he was beginning to understand, there would be. Pyro felt the slow burn start in his body, seeping down as he stared up at him, his would-be mentor. Magneto smiled slowly, as if he sensed what Pyro was feeling, and maybe he did.

Pyro stood up so that the blanket fell off his shoulders, gazing at Magneto with his chin tilted imperiously. "I wouldn't want a picture anyway. Look how that guy ended up."

Magneto cocked his head and gave him a speculative look. "You finished the book? In the hour you've been in here?"

"Nah, but I skipped to the end. It sucked." He shrugged.

Magneto threw his head back and laughed, though to Pyro he sort of looked like he'd rather not. "The dregs of Victorian aestheticism not quite as good entertainment as a video game?"

St. John found himself smiling a little at that and moving closer to the solid weight of Magneto's presence, as if he was fire seeking steel to enfold in his embrace. "Nope."

"We'll have to find something else to amuse you, then." He reached out and laid the backs of his fingers against Pyro's face gently, almost fondly. "I'm pleased you didn't like the book."

"Because it was the dregs of Victorian…aesth—ethic—" he stumbled over the word, but not because he didn't know what it was. It was more because he was unsure how he ended up standing this close to Magneto, with his hands creeping up to rest on the other man's shoulders. 

Magneto's body was firm beneath Pyro's hands, like the metal he so effortlessly twisted into submission. Pyro himself was now feeling very hot and flushed with the fire that was his gift. It occurred to him suddenly these powers weren't just some cool trick he could do to impress his friends; fire was a part of him, it burned in his blood, simmering embers imbedded in his mind, his soul, his very being. Magneto was the same, as was Mystique. _It makes us family. ___

_Brotherhood. _

"Partly that." Magneto leaned down and placed his mouth very close to Pyro's ear. "You can't ever go back, St. John." Pyro shivered at the feel of his breath on the sensitive inner whorls of his ear, but the shivers felt like they may be tinged with flame.

The younger man paused, then dropped the book he was holding on the couch. He turned his head and let all that fire in him rise to the surface. "I'm Pyro," he said in a quiet, sure voice.

"Are you? Are you really? You're certain of it, now?" The emotionless, rather aloof attitude from earlier that day had vanished completely; Magneto seemed to be coiled with tension, his voice imbued with a leashed excitement that made Pyro's remember reading Jonathan Edwards back in school. _Sinners in the hands of an angry God…. ___

_More like humans in the hands of an angry Mutant would-be liberator. _

The Professor had always spoken with a cool certainty about his beliefs and his methods. Magneto always sounded like one of those old-time preachers he saw on TV late at night—voice resonating with the same confidence of conviction, but with an underlying passion and zealotry that was far more attractive to someone who literally felt the sting of fire in his blood.

There was a moment in Boston, when the fire had trembled in his hands on Bobby Drake's porch, when St. John Allerdyce had felt like he was poised to jump off a very great cliff and tumble into something unknown and dangerous. He'd been both afraid and terribly, terribly excited, and the rush of letting himself go had nearly brought him to his knees long before Rogue had grabbed his ankle and siphoned his powers away.

He felt like that now, body pressed against Magneto's, and he found his hands were moving over him like flames licking at metal submerged in the forge, and he stared up at all the lines that were etched in the older man's face and suddenly understood why Magneto didn't like the book. 

_Better to embrace it, and let the lines show. Be proud of who you are. What you've done. _

"Yeah." Pyro whispered reverently. "Yeah, I am." The truth of it rushed through him in a conflagration; it sparked in his eyes and tinged the edges of his slow, pleased smile.

Magneto's hand ended up tangled in Pyro's hair and he pulled back sharply. The pain felt good, burned him all up, and that's what he wanted and what he'd signed on for, wasn't it?

Magneto smiled; sharp and cutting like a blade on the contours of his face. "Show me," he whispered, and the words sounded like some benediction Pyro had waited his whole life to hear.

So he did, and Pyro didn't think he'd have those empty places inside him ever again. The fire sang to him, and this time, he sang back.

_Finis_


End file.
